@jchampion ,
From my minor experience in running my online card shop, I can tell you everyday you are putting out multiple fires, and there will be the occasional meteor that comes along.
My meteor was this: I recently had the problem where I pre-sold 34 boxes of a new set from Japan, only to be told by my supplier that I am only going to get 0. My initial order quantity was 120 boxes. The main issue was the manufacturing side in Japan is limited (likely due to covid-19 AND to artificially limit supply). There wasn’t enough product to satiate the local Japanese market and so foreign market orders were drastically reduced. To make matters worse, this was my first wave of sales, if my customers don’t get their order, they will never come back and may even leave bad reviews. If that happened, my whole business and brand is gone. Months of hard work down the drain. My supplier didn’t fulfil his job and orders to me, but I didn’t want to disappoint my customers.
The easy choice is to give up. Refund the orders, make a loss, and likely lead to closing up shop. I didn’t want to take the easy choice out. It’s always available. On release day, I spent half a day going to every single shop in my area asking for boxes available (not many, most were sold in pre-orders). I ended up buying at spiked retail price, and I carried all those boxes home, packed and shipped the orders. My customers got the product and they were happy. I made a loss but my business and reputation is in-tact.
This was an important lesson to me: never only have one supplier. And make sure your suppliers are reliable. It is not always about finding the cheapest supplier.
I assume you’re doing it alone. Which also means you do everything. You source the supplier(s), negotiate prices and quantities, research products to buy, become customer support, marketing team, social media team, sales team, the accountant and the list goes on. It’s much easier if you have a team that helps you though, but of course that brings its own challenges.
All I want to say is that it won’t be easy, but nothing ever really is. I’d be interested in sharing things learnt along the way. I do Japanese Pokemon and Digimon cards, I’m assuming our markets don’t clash?
